Specific Examples For Each Race’s Unique Power

We’re still iterating on those; we’re still finalising them so I can’t comment on them exactly quite yet. We’ll have more to say about that later.

One of the key features that was described when the multiplayer got announced was ‘Galactic Readiness’. Are you able to go on the record about exactly how your performance in the multiplayer effects the ‘Galactic Readiness’ in the Single-player? ‘Galactic Readiness’ is just this idea; it’s the number or the metric that’s unifying a lot of the games under the ‘Galaxy at War’ system.

The idea is that as you’re playing lots of single-player and multiplayer, all of those things are affecting the ‘Galaxy at War’ of the galaxy. It’s the ‘Galactic Readiness’ that then helps you unlock or achieve certain things inside the components of the games themselves.

It sounds like you’re tying a lot of this into the final battle with the Reapers…

That’s right, yeah.

And how much armoury and support you can bring with you in the final showdown. All sorts of things are affected by it. Yeah, so one of the ideas behind the ‘Galactic Readiness’ as well is that the scores you can achieve in it are achievable singularly, so you don’t have to play multiplayer and you can only play single-player if you want to. It just provides you with more options for play; it gives you more things you can do.

Obviously in the press releases, BioWare has said that it’s always wanted to add multiplayer to Mass Effect, but is there pressure these days with what would have traditionally been a single-player series to have multiplayer as well?

We don’t get any pressure inside EA – EA has been really good to us and very supportive to a lot of the things we’ve wanted to do. For us it really came down to multiplayer being a new one to try and experiment with, and we had the right story inside Mass Effect 3 of an entire galaxy at war to fit it all together.That was really important to us, that we did the multiplayer justice with areally good setting; a really good environment to do it in, but at the sametime we also had the time to do the single-player right, so we had that aspectas well.